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What Constitutes Well-Being?

The past year I’ve been spending a lot of effort focusing on and creating my own boundaries and framework for personal and professional “fitness.” These criteria were posted on FB by my friend and former teacher, Mark Weathers. They were posed by one of his supervisors at work.

These are amazing questions to consider and thoughtfully ask yourself as you are purposeful in pursuing sustainable health, deeper than fitness and nutrition:

Outlook — How does your perspective on yourself, the present and hopes for the future create generative and creative responses to challenge?

Community — Do you have a healthy and well integrated relationship with a stable group of people?

Ability to suffer — How do you endure with and exhibit resilience against painful/difficult events in life?

Attentiveness — What do you habitually give attention to in your past and present? What are you routinely giving your mindfulness towards?

Ability to struggle — Are you given (by yourself and your social world) the freedom to process and grapple with difficulties in your life, instead of simply medicating them, or denying their weight?

Talking — Are you given the freedom (by yourself and circumstances) to give voice to your views, dissent, disagreements, and unrestrained conversation with others?

Playfulness — The ability to resist and escape seriousness but all types of play is essential to emotional and social flourishing.

Care For The World — Do you open yourself to deepening concern for the world, and those outside your sphere of interaction, or do you resist this concern for the world, and knowledge of it?